Empire of Gold nwaec-7

  Empire of Gold

  ( Nina Wilde and Eddie Chase - 7 )

  Andy Mcdermott

  Empire of Gold

  ANDY MCDERMOTT

  Copyright © 2011 Andy McDermott

  For my family and friends

  Prologue

  Afghanistan

  The barren landscape was simultaneously alien yet oddly familiar to Eddie Chase. The young Englishman had grown up in the rugged hills of Yorkshire, the topography of the northern county in many ways similar to the gnarled ground below the helicopter. But even at night, one difference was obvious. The hills and moors around his home town were green, a living countryside; beneath him now, everything was a parched and dusty brown. A dead land.

  More death would be coming to it tonight.

  Chase looked away from the window to the seven other men in the Black Hawk’s dimly lit cabin. Like him, all were special forces soldiers, faces striped with dark camouflage paint. Unusually, though, the participants in this mission were not all from the same unit, or even the same country. Five were from the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, one of the United Kingdom’s most admired – and feared – elite units. The remaining three, however, were from other nations, the team hurriedly pulled together by the Coalition for the urgent operation.

  Despite this, Chase doubted they would have trouble working together. He already knew two of them, even if his previous dealings with Bob ‘Bluey’ Jackson of the Australian SAS had only been brief. Jason Starkman of the United States Army Special Forces – the Green Berets – had, on the other hand, been a friend for years.

  The third foreign soldier was the unknown quantity, to Chase at least. Although he had been vouched for by the team’s commander, Major Jim ‘Mac’ McCrimmon – and to Chase there were few higher recommendations – he still wanted to get a handle on the beaky-nosed Belgian’s personality before they hit the ground. So he had taken the seat beside him with the intention of teasing out information about the Special Forces Group’s Hugo Castille.

  As it happened, no teasing was necessary. The genial Castille had volunteered so much that even a trained interrogator would have struggled to keep up. ‘So we found a little bar off Las Ramblas,’ he was saying now, ‘and I met the most beautiful Spanish girl. Have you ever been to Barcelona?’ Chase shook his head, wondering how the conversation – well, monologue – had moved from a military operation in Bosnia to chatting up women in Spain in the few seconds he had been looking out of the window. ‘Its architecture matches its women! But as for what we did that night,’ a broad smile, ‘I am a gentleman, so I shall not say.’

  Chase grinned back. ‘So there actually is something that stops you talking?’

  ‘Of course! I—’ Castille stopped as he realised he was being ribbed, and sniffed before taking a polished red apple from a pocket and biting into it.

  A Scottish voice came from across the cabin. ‘Eddie, you accusing somebody of talking too much is a definite case of the pot calling the kettle black.’ The comment prompted laughter from most of the other men.

  ‘Ah, sod off, Mac,’ Chase told his commanding officer cheerily. The tightly knit, high-pressure nature of special forces units allowed for a degree of informality uncommon in the regular military – to a point. ‘At least I talk about more interesting things than bloody cricket and snooker.’

  The stiff-backed man beside Mac had conspicuously not joined in with the laughter. ‘Your definition of interesting isn’t the same as everyone else’s, sergeant.’ Like Chase, Captain Alexander Stikes was in his late twenties, but the similarity ended there. Chase was fairly squat with a square, broken-nosed face that could at best be described as ‘characterful’, while the six-foot-tall, fair-haired officer had the high brow and straight nose of a throwback to Prussian nobility. ‘I think we’d all prefer a bit of quiet.’

  ‘Quiet is the last thing we’ll get in this tub, Alexander,’ said Mac, a hint of chiding audible even over the roar of the Black Hawk’s engines.

  Amused by Stikes’s telling-off, Chase turned back to Castille. ‘That’s the third bit of fruit you’ve had since we left the base. Last I had was a banana for breakfast, and one end was all smushed.’

  Castille took another bite. ‘I always bring lots of fruit on a mission. Much nicer than rations, no? And I have my ways to stop them getting bruised. My father taught me how to take care of them.’

  ‘So he’s some sort of . . . fruit vet?’

  The Belgian smiled. ‘No, a grocer. Nobody wants to buy mushy fruit. What about your father?’

  The question caught Chase off guard. ‘My dad?’

  ‘Yes, what does he do?’

  ‘He works for a logistics company. Shipping,’ he clarified, seeing Castille’s uncertainty. ‘He transports stuff all over the world, gets things through customs. Oh, and he’s also an arsehole.’

  ‘Like father, like son, eh, Yorkie?’ said one of the other SAS men, Kevin Baine. Unlike Mac’s earlier remark, the estuary-accented comment was devoid of playfulness.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Chase replied in kind. Baine’s flat face twisted into a sneer.

  ‘An arse-hole,’ echoed Castille, the word somehow comical in his Belgian French intonation. ‘You do not like him, then?’

  ‘Haven’t spoken to him since I left home ten years ago. Not that I saw much of him even before then. He was always off travelling. And having affairs behind my mum’s back.’ The admission took him somewhat by surprise, Castille’s affable questioning having drawn more out of him than he had intended. He gave his SAS comrades warning looks, daring anyone to make a joke. Stikes’s expression suggested that he had stored the fact away in his mental database, but nobody said anything.

  ‘Ah, I am sorry,’ said Castille.

  Chase shrugged. ‘No problem.’ He had exaggerated – as far as he knew, there had only been the one affair.

  But that was enough.

  Castille was about to add something when the pilot’s voice crackled over a loudspeaker: ‘Ten minutes!’ The mood instantly changed, the eight men straightening sharply in their seats. The red interior lights went out entirely, the only remaining illumination the eerie green glow of the cockpit instruments. Combat lighting, letting the troops’ eyes adapt to night-time conditions.

  ‘Okay,’ said Mac, now entirely serious, ‘since we were a little short on prep, let’s review the situation one last time. Alexander?’

  Stikes leaned forward to address the other men. ‘Right, now listen. As you know, we’ve got eleven United Nations aid workers – and one undercover MI6 officer – being held hostage by the Taliban, and twelve spare seats in our choppers.’ He glanced towards a window; flying a hundred metres from the US Army Black Hawk was a smaller MH-6 Little Bird gunship. ‘I want all of them occupied on the way back. And I want that seat,’ he pointed at one in particular, ‘to have our spy friend in it, alive and well. He’s got information on al-Qaeda that we need – maybe even Osama’s hidey-hole.’

  ‘Makes you wonder if we’d be going on a rescue mission if one of ’em wasn’t a spook,’ said Bluey.

  ‘I don’t wonder,’ Chase told the shaven-headed Australian with dark humour.

  Stikes was unamused. ‘Keep it closed, Chase. Now, the GPS trackers on the UN trucks showed they’d been taken to an abandoned farm, and as of thirty minutes ago they’re still there. A satellite pass earlier today showed one other vehicle and a couple of horses, so we estimate no more than ten to twelve of Terry Taliban. We go in, reduce that number to zero, and recover the hostages.’

  ‘Just to clarify the rules of engagement here,’ said Starkman in his Texan drawl, ‘we’re not only rescuing the good guys, but taking out the bad guys, am I right?’

  Even in
the green half-light from the cockpit, Stikes’s cold smile was clearly visible. ‘Anyone who isn’t a hostage is classified as hostile. And you know what we do to hostiles.’ Grim chuckles from the team.

  ‘Any more word on air support, sir?’ asked the fifth SAS trooper, a chunky Welshman called Will Green.

  ‘Nothing confirmed as yet,’ said Stikes. ‘All our aircraft in the region are engaged on another operation – the ones that aren’t broken down, at least. If anything becomes available, it’ll almost certainly be American.’

  ‘Fucking great,’ muttered Baine. ‘Anyone got spare body armour? Nothing I like more than dodging friendly fire.’

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ said Mac sharply. ‘If it wasn’t for our American friends, we wouldn’t even have these helicopters. Be glad we’re not driving out there in Pink Panthers.’ The SAS Land Rovers, painted in pinkish shades for desert camouflage, had inevitably acquired the nickname.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ Baine gave Starkman a half-hearted nod of apology.

  ‘Any further questions?’ Stikes asked. There were none.

  ‘One last thing,’ said Mac. He regarded his men, focusing particularly on Chase. ‘You’ve all been in combat before, but this might feel different from anything else some of you have experienced. No matter what happens, just stay calm, keep focused, and remember your training. I know you can get these people to safety, so stick together, and fight to the end.’

  ‘Fight to the end,’ Chase echoed, along with Green and Castille.

  The next few minutes passed in as near to silence as it was possible to get inside the Black Hawk’s industrial clamour. Then the pilot’s voice boomed again: ‘One minute!’ Chase glanced out of the window. His eyes had now fully adjusted to the darkness, revealing that the landscape was climbing towards ragged mountains to the north. There were still expanses of desert plain, but they were broken up by steep, knotted hills. Tough terrain.

  And they had six miles of it to cross.

  The Black Hawk’s engine note changed, the aircraft tilting back sharply to slow itself before landing. Chase tensed. Any moment—

  A harsh thump. Green slid open the cabin door on one side, Bluey the other, and the team scrambled out. Chase already had a weapon ready – a Diemaco C8SFW carbine, a Canadian-built variant of the American M4 assault rifle – as he ran clear of the swirling dust and dived flat to the ground, the others doing the same around him.

  The Black Hawk heaved itself upwards, hitting Chase with a gritty downblast as it wheeled back the way it had come. The Little Bird followed. With surprising speed, the chop of the two helicopters’ rotors faded.

  The dust settled. Chase stayed down, scanning the landscape for any hint that they were not alone.

  Nothing. They were in the clear.

  A quiet whistle. He looked round, and saw Mac’s shadowy figure standing up. The other men rose in response. Still wary, they assembled before the bearded Scot as he switched on a red-lensed torch to check first a map, then his compass. ‘That way,’ he said, pointing towards the mountains.

  Chase regarded the black mass rising against the starscape with a grumbling sigh. ‘Buggeration and fuckery. Might have bloody known we’d be going the steepest possible route.’

  ‘Enough complaining,’ snapped Stikes. ‘Chase, you and Green take the lead. All right, let’s move!’

  For most people, traversing six miles of hilly, rock-strewn terrain – in the dark – would be a slow, arduous and even painful task. For the multinational special forces team, however, it was little more than an inconvenient slog. They had night vision goggles, but nobody used them – the stars and the sliver of crescent moon, shining brilliantly in a pollution-free sky, gave the eight men more than enough light. After covering five miles in just over an hour and forty minutes, the only ill effect felt by Chase was a sore toe, and even Mac, oldest of the group by over fifteen years, was still in strong enough shape to be suffering only a slight shortness of breath.

  Not that Chase was going to cut him any slack, dropping back from Green to speak to him as they ascended a dusty hillside. ‘You okay, Mac?’ he asked jovially. ‘Sounds like you’re wheezing a bit. Need some oxygen?’

  ‘Cheeky sod,’ Mac replied. ‘You know, when I joined the Regiment the entrance exercises were much harder than they are now. A smoker like you would have dropped dead before finishing the first one.’

  ‘I only smoke off duty. And I didn’t know the SAS even existed in the nineteenth century!’

  ‘Keep your mouth shut, Chase,’ growled Stikes from behind them. ‘They’ll be able to hear you half a mile away, bellowing like that.’

  Chase’s voice had been barely above a conversational level, but he lowered it still further to mutter, ‘See if you can hear this, you fucking bell-end.’

  ‘What was that, sergeant?’

  ‘Nothing, Alexander,’ Mac called back to Stikes, suppressing a laugh. ‘That’s enough of that, Eddie. Catch up with Will before he reaches the top of the hill. We’re getting close.’

  ‘On it, sir,’ said Chase, giving Mac a grin before increasing his pace up the slope. By the time he drew level with Green, his levity had been replaced by caution, senses now on full alert. Both men dropped and crawled the last few feet to peer over the summit.

  Ahead was a rough plain about half a mile across, a great humped sandstone ridge rising steeply at the far side. A narrow pass split the ridge from the mountains, a large rock near its entrance poking from the ground like a spearhead. The obvious route to the isolated farm was by travelling up the pass.

  So obvious that it had to be a trap.

  Unless the Taliban were complete idiots, which whatever his other opinions about them Chase thought was unlikely, there would almost certainly be guards watching the ravine’s far end. It was a natural choke point, easy for a few men to cover, and almost impossible to pass through undetected. And if the team were detected, that would be the end for the hostages. One gunshot, even one shout, would warn that a rescue was being attempted.

  Which meant the guards had to be removed. But first . . . they had to be found.

  Chase shrugged off his pack and extracted his night vision goggles. He switched them on, waited for the display’s initial flare to fade, then donned them. The vista ahead became several times brighter, picked out in ghostly shades of green. He searched for any sign of movement. Nothing.

  ‘See anything, Eddie?’ Green asked quietly.

  ‘Nothing on the ground . . . just checking that ridge.’ Chase raised his head. The top of the rise would be a good place to station a lookout, giving a clear view of the plain, but it would also be a lot of effort to scale.

  Too much effort, apparently. There was nobody there. He closed his eyes to ease the transition back to normal sight, then removed the goggles and waved to the waiting soldiers. By the time Mac joined him, his vision had mostly recovered. ‘Anything?’ his commanding officer asked.

  ‘Nope. Thought they might have put someone on the ridge, but it’s empty.’

  Mac surveyed the scene, then took out the map. ‘We’ll go over the ridge, come at anybody watching the pass from the southeast. It’s a closed canyon; they won’t be expecting anyone from that direction.’

  Starkman examined the closely packed contour lines. ‘Steep climb.’

  Bluey regarded his bulky Minimi machine gun – and its 200-round ammo box – disconsolately. ‘Aw, that’s great. I’m hardly going to spring up there like a mountain goat with this lot.’

  ‘Starkman, Chase, Castille,’ said Stikes impatiently, ‘get to the top and see if you can snipe them, otherwise go down the other side and take them from the canyon. The rest of us will wait by that large rock for your signal.’ He gave Mac a brief glance, waiting for affirmation; the Scot nodded. ‘Okay, move it.’

  After checking their radios, the trio made their way across the plain. Chase looked up at the moonlit ridge. ‘Should be able to get up there without ropes,’ he said, indicating a likely path.
‘We— What the bloody hell are you doing?’

  Castille had peeled a banana, wolfing down half of it in a single bite. ‘For energy,’ he mumbled as he chewed. ‘We have a big climb.’

  Chase shook his head. ‘Hugo, you’re weird.’

  ‘Literally bananas,’ Starkman added. He and Chase laughed, prompting a snort from Castille, who polished off the fruit before bagging and pocketing its skin.

  ‘So, we all ready?’ Chase asked. ‘Or have you got a bunch of grapes an’ all?’

  ‘You may laugh,’ said Castille, starting up the ridge, ‘but you British should eat more fruit. It is why you are all so pale!’

  Grinning, Chase followed, Starkman taking up the rear. The climb proved a little more tricky than it looked, the three men having to help each other scale a couple of particularly steep sections, but before long it flattened out.